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Doodle Artist Fanciful Rats – A Review

Disclaimer – Please read this disclosure about my use of affiliate links which are contained within this post.Doodle Artist – Fanciful Rats: A colouring book for grown ups is a lovely book illustrated and kindly sent to me by Annette Rand. This book is filled with 30 full-page spreads of images of rats and they’re lovely! I’m personally not a fan of rats in real life, their tails put me off I’m afraid but, you can’t help but be enchanted by Annette’s charming drawings of them. This paperback book is A4 size, with a portrait cover and a mixture of portrait and landscape images. The book is glue-bound so it’s a little difficult to get it to lie flat but the images are printed single-sided with a large border around them so none of the image is lost into the spine. What I really noticed about this book, apart from the stunning images, is the paper quality. Many self-published books are printed on thin paper that you can see half the proceeding images through. Not-so in Annette’s book, the paper is bright white and thick enough that my water-based fineliners didn’t bleed at all or chew up the paper in any way so it was a joy to colour and would be perfect for pens or pencils and you could even use your sharpies or alcohol pens with a protective sheet behind so that the next image doesn’t get spoiled.

In terms of mental health, this book is lovely. It’s really calming and has various different levels of intricacy to suit your good and bad days. The line thickness is the same throughout and I would describe it as thin but not very thin (approximately fineliner thickness). The lines are crisp and accurate with no fuzziness, blurring or not quite joining up so this is a really professional looking book. The images of the rats are very varied ranging from mandalas to scenes, steampunk to patterns, there is a surprising amount of variety added to a single, potentially limiting subject! Some of the rats have larger open spaces to colour in blocks and others have intricate patterns covering them that create lots of small spaces for you to take your time over colouring in. I really enjoyed colouring this book ready for review and it was a great design to use my glitter gel pens on. The rats are beautifully drawn – some are swirly, some are patterned, some are furry and a couple are steampunk themed. This really is the colouring book bible for all those who love rats. The majority of the images aren’t drawn like real-life rats, because they’re covered in patterns or hidden within mandalas but this means that you can use any colour scheme you like, as you’ll see from my glittery rainbow rat below!

I found this book really calming and relaxing. As with all nature themed books, I find them the most relaxing and the best at reducing my anxiety levels and this book was no exception. The pictures are beautiful, there are no filler images and each has definitely earnt its right to be there and you could even cut them out once you’re done and frame them.The variation in levels of detail and intricacy means that as long as you have fairly good vision, you’ll be able to enjoy this book on your good and bad days and those of you with moderate to good fine motor control will definitely get a huge amount out of this book. The image below was coloured using UK supermarket own-brand glitter gel pens. If you’d like to get a copy of Fanciful Rats then head over to Amazon here Doodle Artist – Fanciful Rats: A colouring book for grown ups